Hi Beth,
I have contacted Access Solutions, the maker of the Dectalk USB and informed them of the problem that I was having with the unit. Unfortunately, although the gentleman I spoke with was extremely knowledgeable about Dectalk and its behavior in terms of serial mode communications, he was not aware of Gnopernicus. I tried my best to explain the problem as best I could. However, since I am not a programmer, I am not sure how well I did. He seemed very willing to work on resolving this issue so that others don't have problems with Linux or any other screen readers.
Thanks to everyone for the public and private responses I have received on this matter.
I'm glad you are moving toward resolving this with Access Solutions. I think the most critical things are:
1. That the DECTalk Express can be "killed" with a particular sequence of characters sent to it. This is fundamentally a DECTalk Express issue. It doesn't really have anything to do with Gnopnericus. Some other application could have done the same thing.
2. That Gnopernicus by default launches wanting to talk to a particular Braille device, and that this is unexpected by users and can have unintended side effects (such as your rather catastrophic one).
There has been some discussion in this thread about Gnopernicus "probing" the serial port trying to determine which Braille device is connected. In discussions with BAUM engineering earlier today, I don't believe this to be the case. From all that I've seen in this thread and from my own familiarity with Gnopernicus, I believe that #2 above is what happened.
It has been suggested that Gnopernicus NOT be launchable *initially* from the GUI, but rather that the first launching must instead be from the command line and that the options there then be taken by Gnopernicus and used thereafter. I personally think this is a mistake. Too many magnification users need it to work. We also introduce a significant impediment to localization by having Gnopernicus play a WAV file (rather than immediately default to using speech).
Personally, I think the appropriate solution is to have Gnopernicus either use only BrlAPI as Braille by default with no command-line options, or to not use Braille at all by default when launched with no command-line options.
Regards,
Peter Korn Sun Accessibility team
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